Tuesday, October 18, 2016

The Failure of University Education for Development & What To Teach Instead





About the Book
Title: The Failure of University Education for Development & What To Teach Instead
Author: Samuel A. Odunsi, Sr.
Genre: Nonfiction, education, economics
Finally, a New Big Idea that Solves Our Toughest Problems.
New book by Samuel A. Odunsi, Sr. defines the problem of tacit cultural knowledge in education and how to solve it.
University education may benefit the individual, but it has not led to overall economic development.  For many developing countries, the hope behind university education far exceeds the results. The ideas and solution presented in this book provides a way to equalize the results of university education with the hope and unrealized expectations behind it.
        Education cannot teach everything about development. The most crucial aspects of development are tacit in nature and cannot be directly expressed or taught. Instead, they are acquired passively in culture.
        Liberal Education has struggled with this problem. While its lofty goals are well defined, they cannot be met without the tacit knowledge for development, which it can barely define, much less teach.
        The concept of “Cultural Diversity” recognizes that there are differences between cultures, including tacit cultural knowledge.
        The tacit knowledge needed for development is not specific knowledge. Instead it is the connection of the elements of the western economic model, that may be learned in school, to the language capacity that all human beings already possess and use for creatively expressing the spoken language.
        This is why expatriates from the West and the developed countries of Asia often perform successfully as managers and entrepreneurs in the developing countries, despite the constraints of underdevelopment. To them, the elements of the economic model are merely vocabulary to be expressed as management, administration, or entrepreneurship, using the language capacity.
        The purpose of university education should be to connect technical knowledge about economic development with the language capacity that students already possess. In the same way that the human language capacity can be repurposed for the use of a second language. Graduates can then express the economic model with the versatility and creativity they already use for expressing the spoken language.
        The means for achieving this purpose is now available and presented in the book and on this site: www.HumanRethink.net.
        Help bring real change to our world. Make it happen now. Contact mail@HumanRethink.net



Author Bio
Born in Nigeria, Samuel A. Odunsi, Sr. left for college in Texas in 1982 and has lived in Austin ever since.
A new big idea about how education actually works and how to bring real development to the rest of the world has finally been developed. 
I stumbled on this discovery decades ago, after years of working as a freelance research assistant in the Austin, Texas area. I realized that this is what marked the difference between education that could make the university graduate an effective manager, no matter the area of specialization, and education that merely promised to do so. It was the difference between the disorder of the world in which we live, and one where every country can be as developed as the western nations.
But I was not an academic, and I’m still not one. This meant I couldn’t pursue the new ideas full time. Nevertheless, I spent much of my free time researching and substantiating these ideas. However, the demands of making a living in a business that is unrelated, and the demands of family made it a never ending project.
Meanwhile, 9-11 happened, then the Arab Spring, then ISIS.  In all these events, I believe my ideas had an important role to play. I believe they provide the essential but missing narrative in these events as well as in many others. The new ideas provide the answer to a lot of questions.
In 2015, after the loss of my father and younger sister, I realized I may never have the time to present the ideas in the 5 volumes I had always planned.  At the same time, I also realized that the solution was more important than the presentation or its length. I then proceeded to write down my key ideas in 1 short volume, using language that is accessible to the casual reader. I now have a book ready!
I’m in the process of presenting the contents of the book on Humanrethin.net, broadcasting them as much as I can, taking on all challengers, and raising funds to begin implementation anywhere on the planet.
But first, I need to get the ideas out there.  I’m hoping this book tour will help.

Links


Book Excerpts


SYMPTOMS
“The symptoms of the failure of university education include corruption, poor governance, instability, poor infrastructure, terrorism, poverty and all the other problems that we see in underdeveloped countries. As long as university education remains ineffective, the symptoms are incurable. Nevertheless, expatriates have always operated and maintained successful businesses and other organizations of various sizes in these countries. The symptoms do not affect their performance. The symptoms “affect” only the indigenes of the country. The performance of expatriates shows that there is no “gradual” in real development. If the thousands of existing university graduates have been as effective as the expatriates who make things work in their countries, underdevelopment will not exist today, the symptoms will be gone.”
“…persistent underdevelopment is a problem that shows the same symptoms in every country, where university graduates often cannot independently or autonomously make things work effectively and perpetually without expatriates. Depending on the size of revenues from natural resources, the size of foreign aid, globalization, or a lack of these, the number and intensity of symptoms from this problem may differ from one country to the next. The history of each country also may be uniquely different. But in varying degrees, the incurable symptoms of the problem are the same. These symptoms are then forever studied as independent “causes.” We don’t do that here.



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